Google Workspace incident

Some customers may experience slowness while using Google Drive.

Minor Resolved View vendor source →

Google Workspace experienced a minor incident on August 18, 2026 affecting Google Drive, lasting 12h 42m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.

Started
Aug 18, 2026, 11:58 PM UTC
Resolved
Aug 19, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC
Duration
12h 42m
Detected by Pingoru
Aug 18, 2026, 11:58 PM UTC

Affected components

Google Drive

Update timeline

  1. monitoring Aug 19, 2026, 03:57 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause. We will provide an update by Tuesday, 2026-08-18 22:00 PDT with current details. We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption. Symptoms: Affected customers may experience slowness while using Google Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  2. monitoring Aug 19, 2026, 04:59 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 00:30 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness while using Google Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  3. investigating Aug 19, 2026, 06:49 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team has identified the root cause of the issue and is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 01:30 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  4. investigating Aug 19, 2026, 07:59 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team has identified the root cause of the issue and is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 02:00 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  5. investigating Aug 19, 2026, 08:54 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 03:00 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  6. investigating Aug 19, 2026, 09:54 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 04:30 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  7. investigating Aug 19, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

    Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Drive beginning Tuesday, 2026-08-18 16:58 PDT. Our engineering team is actively working on a mitigation strategy. There is no ETA for full resolution. We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 06:00 PDT with current details. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may experience slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: None at this time.

  8. resolved Aug 19, 2026, 01:05 PM UTC

    Description: The issue with Google Drive has been resolved for all affected customers as of Wednesday, 2026-08-19 05:40 PDT. Our engineering teams determined the slowness was the result of a localized capacity and routing issue within our regional infrastructure. To restore service, we implemented a fix to alleviate the network congestion and accelerated a planned infrastructure upgrade in the affected region to ensure normal performance levels. We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue. Symptoms: Affected customers in Australia and New Zealand may have experienced slowness or 502 errors, with some users briefly unable to access Drive. Workaround: The issue is now mitigated

  9. resolved Aug 20, 2026, 08:00 PM UTC

    Preliminary Incident Report We sincerely apologize for the disruption this incident caused to your business. We know how much you rely on Google Workspace, and we regret the impact on your productivity. We are working to address the root cause and prevent this from occurring in the future. Please note, this information is based on our best knowledge at the time of posting and is subject to change as our investigation continues. A final Incident Report with preventative actions will be posted once our investigation is complete. If you have experienced impact outside of what is listed below, please reach out to Google Workspace Support using the help article https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 (https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213). Date/Time of the Issue (All time US/Pacific) Incident Start: 18 August 2026 16:58 Incident End: 19 August 2026 05:40 Duration: 12 hours, 42 minutes Summary On August 18, 2026 from 16:58 to August 19, 2026 05:40 US/Pacific, Drive customers in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced degraded performance and slowness. During this period users also experienced 502 errors. Other Google Workspace services were not affected. Preliminary Root Cause Google utilizes a multi-tiered global load balancing and network routing architecture to serve traffic efficiently. To ensure fair use and prevent congestion, bandwidth allocation is managed by attributing traffic to specific downstream services. A misconfiguration in the attribution of traffic caused the bandwidth usage to be incorrectly attributed to the frontend network load balancing tier itself, rather than to the Drive service. The sequence of events leading to customer impact was as follows: * Traffic from the regional load balancing tier was incorrectly attributed to the load balancing infrastructure rather than the Drive service. * Unrelated traffic caused network bandwidth usage attributed to the load balancing infrastructure in this region to exceed its quota. * Network bandwidth management systems applied throttling to this traffic to enforce quotas, causing severe network congestion affecting Drive traffic in this region. * This congestion led to increased latency, slowness, and error rates for users accessing Drive in the affected regions. Remediation Google engineers were alerted to the issue via automated monitoring and an influx of customer support cases, with initial incident response teams engaged by 17:21 US/Pacific on August 18, 2026. Engineers initially attempted to alleviate the congestion by draining regional frontend traffic to an alternate geographic location, but this proved ineffective and was reverted. The team then mitigated the issue by migrating regional traffic to an upgraded internal network routing architecture, which correctly set the traffic attribution for Drive. Normal operations were fully restored once 100% of the regional traffic was migrated to the upgraded network architecture. Description of Impact Between August 18, 2026, at 16:58 US/Pacific and August 19, 2026, at 05:40 US/Pacific, Google Drive users in Australia, Philippines and New Zealand experienced severe latency, degraded performance and 502 errors. During this roughly 12-hour and 42-minute window, affected customers may have observed significant slowness or errors when attempting to access Google Drive or listing files through Editors (e.g. docs.google.com (http://docs.google.com)), with initial load times significantly delayed. The issue was fully mitigated as of August 19, 2026, at 05:40 US/Pacific, and normal service has been restored.